Gour Noir
A raw goat’s milk cheese from France, bought from Mons.
This is a little leaf-shaped nugget of cheese, covered in a pretty wrinkled geotrichium rind. It’s been dusted with ash, top and bottom, and is a lovely charcoal-grey colour under its wrinkles. The sides are paler and less ashy, but still have that brain-wrinkled rind, pale creamy yellow with a white bloom. more »
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Terschelling Schapenkaas
A hard, pasturised sheep’s cheese from Terschelling, in the Netherlands, bought from Boerenkaas.
We have a wedge of this hard sheep’s cheese. Its interior is an opaque pale creamy white, smooth-looking, and dotted with uneven little holes. Towards the rind it becomes translucent and a little darker. more »
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Asda’s summer stilton might be the pinnacle of cheese-with-stuff-in wrongness. It’s white stilton with – can I remember this? can I ever forget it? – white chocolate, vanilla, orange peel, and peach. I needed to try it.
And while I was there, I noticed that Asda also sold something billed as the Ultimate Chocolate Cheese – Wensleydale with Belgian milk chocolate liberally scattered through it. So I sorta, umm, ended up buying that too. more »
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 9 Comments
FT’s resident cheese expert Marna held a cheese and whisky tasting last Friday night. As ever with booze-blogging, some details and opinions below may be slightly ‘inaccurate’. more »
In cheese-with-stuff-in news I sorta want to try this. Would anyone like to watch and laugh join in?
L’Etivaz
A hard, unpasturised, alpine cow’s milk cheese from Switzerland, bought from KaseSwiss.
This is a slice of pale yellow cheese. The brown rind tastes dark and musty – not an eating-rind, really. The cheese is slightly soft, and scattered with tiny white spots of crunchy potential
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • 2 Comments
So we get a winner, down on Brewer Street in Soho, the Glasshouse Stores was voted the number one pub of the noughties by those of us who voted. A nice pub sure, but so much better than the others? To find out why it scored so highly I thought I would canvas a number of opinions – feel free to add your own at the bottom.
Tom Says:
My memory may be cheating me but I think the first time we ended up in the Glasshouse Stores it was due to a power cut a pub or two along. Marvellous serendipity if so, and appropriate: an accidental pub becoming a shrine to the unintended social consequences of setting up an online community. This is the top pub of the 00s and is tied firmly to the 00s: I can quite imagine never visiting it again, which isn’t something I can say about several others. The regular ILX meet-ups we held there are mostly a thing of the past, for the happy reason that participants basically stopped being “message board posters” and started being simply ‘friends’. What that misses out is the random element, of course – the sense on entering a get-together that you never quite knew who would turn up. Sometimes new faces, occasionally unwelcome ones – the internet meet-up pitches itself halfway between the cosy drink with mates and the party. more »
I didn't even have a knife for cutting the cheese - you don't expect me to have a PHOTOGRAPH of it for you, do you?
A hard unpasturised goat’s milk cheese, made in Somerset and bought from Neals Yard Dairy.
Kat joined me for an impromptu picnic lunch, and we bought a wedge of this. (Note to self: next time choose a SOFTER cheese if you have no knife!) It’s a very pale parchment-coloured cheese, hard and smooth and with a smattering of tiny gaps, covered in a crumbly wrinkled light grey rind. more »
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This cheese is an old friend and favourite of mine, and I’m not sure why it’s taken me this long to get around to mentioning it here. We snaffle a wedge of it for lunch. It’s pale and crumbly in the centre, chalkily opaque, and coloured a gentle primrose primrose-yellow. Under the rind the curd has broken down and formed a soft, slightly sticky, darker translucent layer. The rind itself is a mottled brownish grey, musty, dark and dusty. more »
marna in FT /Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Dear internet. I am not being judgemental. But please explain this to me.
Non-alcoholic drinks aren’t always a concern of Publog but there are perfectly good arguments for sitting in a pub and drinking them, not least because dammit some of them, namely the noble Slime, are pretty great.
I am from South Oxfordshire, which is something I generally manage to disguise by being militant about which bit of London it is best to live in. However, every now and then something will flag up my yokel origins, the most striking being the seemingly inexplicable tendency of barpeople to, when I ask for a soda and lime, hand me a mysterious pint of Strongbow which some fool has placed lime cordial into. In some situations, this is …well, not per se acceptable but something deeply British in me assumes it must be my fault somehow and drinks the pint before trying ‘diet coke’ as a phrase next time. There are, however, some situations where this is not a viable option, for instance when on prescription druqks that do not mix with lovely (or borderline-undrinkable) bouze or when handling heavy machinery, etc. which leads to me being in a permanent state of fear regarding what on earth the barperson is going to come up with. more »
The food and drink section of Freaky Trigger - a home to anything remotely to do with eating, drinking and the experiences formed around them. Pubs, restaurants, food links - what music is to the ears, the publog attempts to do to the eats.
It is no longer just about pubs (though they will turn up I don't doubt) if it goes in your mouth - it goes in Pumpkin Publog.